John Steinbeck Quotes

Time is the only critic without ambition.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.